Sunday, July 22, 2012

So, I've gotten busy with a variety of projects this summer... First, I'm teaching again for a couple of different summer school program/mes (choose your spelling depending upon location ;-D), and that's been great both for experience and $$. Also, I finished recording some new music a couple weeks ago, which I will soon (hopefully) be making available for the world -- or at least the few people who are interested -- to hear. I am working, slowly, on a paper that I will be presenting at the 2012 Soren Kierkegaard Conference in Copenhagen... that happens from August 21-24, so I've got to finish that!

But, at the moment, I also have to finish an article for the Kierkegaard Resources series. I had been delaying that to work on other things. But I received an email saying that the publisher wants to get things rolling, so I have to get it done in the next few days! So... all that to say, I'm feeling a bit busy right about now! All good things, of course, but it does mean I don't have time to do things like update this blog regularly. Not that I've been doing a good job of that, anyway. But, I like making excuses. ;-) hehe. Ok, back to work!

Sunday, July 8, 2012

"The future actuality of the world is not a matter of hope; it is made. It belongs to the context of worldly action; it is a matter of calculation and cannot do with hopes any more than we can work with hope in constructing an aeroplane or in pursuing historical-critical inquiry into the past. The future actuality of the world is something which can be made. As such it does not originate immediately from the word of promise, but from the work of the diviner, who, according to Kant, truly represents 'things imminent in future time', if he 'himself creates and continues the events which he announces in advance'...

What can be made does not become, in the strict sense of 'becoming ex nihilo'. We make actuality out of that which is actual. We change, we transform. In this way, we make the future. God, however, is not one who transforms; he is the creator, who allows possibility to move toward actuality. But this possibility arises from the divine distinction between the possible and the impossible, arises, that is, ex nihilo. The world's possibility is not within but external to its actuality. And its being is external to its futurity."

Eberhard Jüngel - "The World as Possibility and Actuality" (from his Theological Essays)

Sunday, July 1, 2012

"Jehovah says: I am who I am; I am. This is the supreme being. But to be in this way is too exalted for us human beings, much too earnest. Therefore we must try to become something; to be something is easier. Roguish, as everything related to humanity is, we express it in this way: earnestness is to be something.

Most men, or at least almost everyone, would die of anxiety about himself if his being should be—a tautology; they are more anxious about this kind of being and about themselves than about seeing themselves. So their situation is mitigated. The alleviation might be, for example: I am Chancellor, Knight of Denmark, member of the Cavalry Purchasing Commission, Alderman, Director of the Club. In a deeper sense all this is—diversion.

But, to repeat, man is probably not able to bear true earnestness. What I am inveighing against is merely this lying, this making diversion into earnestness. And yet perhaps I am wrong here, too; for generally men would never be able to last it out if they weren't permitted to live in the illusion that this is earnestness; they would die of anxiety about life and about themselves at the mere thought that their earnestness is diversion, without, however, being deprived of this diversion.

But no doubt all these numerous predicates are actually diversions, distractions, which prevent a man from the deepest impression of this to be. And how infinitely far men now are from being able to bear the actual impression of earnestness is best seen from the fact that they have even made this predicative being into—Christianity."